Look­ing for Group — Kevin Slavin
if we spend time in the worlds of these games, what hap­pens when we extract these types of dynam­ics we’re used to in these worlds into the real world?
peo­ple who share space should share expe­ri­ences
it’s one of the pow­er­ful things the soft­ware we have should do
it’s about chang­ing the con­di­tions we’re in when we’re together

he lives in a co-op in Brook­lyn, lived there for 4 years before a cri­sis came up
before the cri­sis, he thought of the peo­ple who lived in the build­ing as neigh­bors; now as share­hold­ers
he set up a Yahoo group for them to help them all com­mu­ni­cate
“I broke my build­ing“
ter­mites appeared in one apart­ment — whose prob­lem is it?
paint­ing the walls — “this is where you see democ­racy fall to bits“
showed email mes­sages to the Yahoo Group
res­i­dents started writ­ing graf­fiti on the walls because the Yahoo group wasn’t anony­mous
there was no in-fighting until the Yahoo group
these types of groups let you tweak your iden­tity
email is how we work all day, so thinks they became their work iden­ti­ties at home because now they were using email to com­mu­ni­cate
took those iden­ti­ties out of the office and into every­day life
the end of role­less­ness — they were just neigh­bors until this, had no roles
email has rules that are dif­fer­ent than the rules of every­day life
there are rules of prox­im­ity that are fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent than how we express our­selves in email
the online rules broke the real world
what was removed was a sense of civil­ity — what did that?
the tone changed when it became one-to-many, rather than one-to-one; the com­mu­ni­ca­tion went pub­lic
they weren’t anony­mous, but they became their email selves, which has more to do with how they spend their day
Kevin sug­gested shut­ting down the list pretty quickly, but the oth­ers asked him not to (they felt like they were win­ning, etc.)
things only changed six months ago when a com­mon event caused suf­fer­ing for every­one and it wasn’t any one person’s fault — that’s when they became civil again

Any­thing but Rou­tine: Games and the Post-Bureaucratic Insti­tu­tion — Thomas Mal­aby
what hap­pens when an orga­ni­za­tion tries to run itself like a game
bureau­cracy
every moment will fit into a category

what we mean by rules (sources of con­straint)
– laws (con­tracts)
– archi­tec­ture
– social con­ven­tion
– the market

games also use these forms of con­trol, too
they are sup­posed to gen­er­ate inde­ter­mi­nate out­comes; no one knows ahead of time

Sec­ond Life
Lin­den Labs is in an unusual posi­tion on this con­trol because they don’t know where it will end up
“let emer­gent effects reign”

a dilemma fol­lows from this, though — still have to run the com­pany by the same ideals
– it’s eth­i­cal com­mit­ment to open-ended cre­ation runs counter to the clas­si­cally bureau­cratic approach; also can’t go the charis­matic leader route
– by exten­sion, this mut also ide­ally gov­ern how Lin­den Lab oper­ates — it too must be anti-bureaucratic
– the result? a cri­sis of legit­i­mate decision-making

so they turned to Arpad Elo, a math­meti­cian, who gave them a way to rank play­ers
they ended up putting every task in Jira soft­ware (because the head of the com­pany said they would do this); employ­ees picked a win­ner from the tasks, which gen­er­ated a rank­ing of what they would work on
turned to game tech­niques to make decisions

“ludic bureau­cracy” — lin­ger­ing ques­tions
– is this the new insti­tu­tion for the Dig­i­tal Age?
– how legit­i­mate are the outcomes/decisions reached by game techniques?

they exited the sys­tem after less than a month

Rules — Kathy Sierra

Time­line:
1. blog com­ments
2. ‘mean kids’ site
3. email exchanges
4. ‘mean kids’ comes down
5. uncle­bo­bism appears
6. police
7. I blog it
7.5. retal­i­a­tion
8. media night­mare
9. offline

why did it become such a big story?
direct result of her visibility?

she tried to ana­lyze it, includ­ing what peo­ple called the whole thing

inter­net “rules“
1. don’t feed the trolls (but it esca­lated because they were try­ing to get a reac­tion
2. if it’s on the net, it’s not a REAL threat (this is what peo­ple told her)
3. you own your own words (and nobody else’s); ques­tion: are you respon­si­ble for com­ments oth­ers make on your blog?
4. civil­ity = cen­sor­ship
5. “if you want to be on the inter­net, grow a pair“
6. online friends are “real” friends… and can be trusted (site own­ers involved didn’t know who was posting)

psy­cho­log­i­cal “rules“
the brain has a mind of its own
1. anonymity — “the greater inter­net fuck­wad the­ory“
part of the prob­lem is the brain’s “illu­sion of invul­ner­a­bil­ity“
peo­ple who sur­vive hor­rific sce­nar­ios have less of this illu­sion of invul­ner­a­bil­ity
2. any­one can be seduced by sit­u­a­tional forces and group dynam­ics
“the lucifer effect” — The Stan­ford Prison Exper­i­ment & The Stan­ley Mil­gram Obe­di­ence Stud­ies
it can hap­pen almost instantly

the per­sua­sive power of social proof — it’s why adver­tis­ing works
“if he’s doing it, it must be okay to do”

Doc Searls took down his blogroll because it put him one degree away from some­one behind the mean sites

we can use the power of social proof
1. code of con­duct — not even explicit; eg, Javaranch reg­is­tra­tion terms of ser­vice, which con­sist of “be nice.” “no dumb ques­tions” and “no dumb answers;” mod­er­a­tors keep the tone
2. who we rec­om­mend — remem­ber that our read­ers per­ceive links as endorse­ments, even if we don’t mean them to be
be aware of what can appear to be accep­tance, tacit approval, or even cel­e­bra­tion
most impor­tantly, be mind­ful of your brain’s deceptions

a good rule: less bark, more wag

Joi Ito
We Know/We No Forums for his WoW guild
used to work as a DJ in a club and sees many of the same issues in online forums
in the past, if you could do it in the game, it was okay — find­ing the hack was okay; design­ers worked to keep out the hacks
now, though, Blizzard’s terms of ser­vice states that just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you can — they will still ban you
issue of buy­ing gold out­side of the game to use in-game
Bliz­zard uses the terms sub­jec­tively when they want to
so the guild had to cre­ate a long set of rules for how to han­dle gold
best metaphors are the night­club and church ones — it can become unfun and unravel very quickly
Joi is a dic­ta­tor about the metaphors only in terms of run­ning the forums
cor­po­rate metaphor com­pletely fails (because what you do isn’t based on your job)

Law & Vir­tual Worlds — Greg Las­towka
low stakes in vir­tual worlds right now, but may change
Four par­ties involved: two play­ers, the owner of the plat­form, and the state
player invest­ments = time and money
own­ers invest­ment = time and money and tech­no­log­i­cal con­trol
state = gen­er­ally not invested

looked at 5 dif­fer­ent pos­si­ble sce­nar­ios of prob­lems and whether the state inter­venes or not
fifth sce­nario involves a fifth party and stolen copyright/trademark

2 big ques­tions
1 — legally, what is a vir­tual world? (what is it like?)
2– how do the opti­mal rules for vir­tual worlds differ?

we need a more sophis­ti­cated frame­work for apply­ing law to vir­tual worlds

vir­tual worlds as com­mu­ni­ties, games, fic­tions
not really spe­cial if they’re just online com­mu­ni­ties
state defers more to com­mu­nity self-ordering (game rules), but may inter­vene in the case of games
for fic­tion, the state has sub­stan­tial def­er­ence to all aspects of vir­tual wor­llds — own­ers are priv­i­leged speak­ers (eg, the­ater); pos­si­ble defense to keep­ing the state out of vir­tual worlds

what is an “opti­mal” pol­icy for ludic order­ing? (game, con­tract, state)
reg­u­la­tion by state — clas­sic legal rule, gen­er­ally “uni­form“
cus­tomiz­able as con­tracts, though (EULAs, pri­vate agree­ments)
so the ques­tion is are games some­how spe­cial?
game rules — effi­cient, arbi­trary, state’s role if they are arbi­trary? who decides?